Similarity Searches.

Similarity Searches. A common activity in biopharmaceutical companies is the search for drug analogues. Starting with a promising drug molecule, one can search for chemical compounds with similar structure or properties to a known compound. There are a variety of methods used in these searches, including sequence similarity, 2D and 3D shape similarity, substructure similarity, electrostatic similarity and others. A variety of bioinformatic tools and search engines are available for this work.

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Importance of Bioinformatics

Why Is Bioinformatics So Important?
Although a human disease may not be found in exactly the same form in animals, there may be sufficient data for an animal model that allow researchers to make inferences about the process in humans.


The rationale for applying computational approaches to facilitate the understanding of various biological processes includes:
a more global perspective in experimental design


the ability to capitalize on the emerging technology of database-mining - the process by which testable hypotheses are generated regarding the function or structure of a gene or protein of interest by identifying similar sequences in better characterized organisms

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